According to spokespeople for the two companies a report on Sunday evening in the Wall Street Journal, the much-rumored and never-admitted merger talks between IBM and Sun Microsystems appear to have hit an impasse.

The way workplace disputes are handled will change from Monday. The Government's scrapping of the statutory grievance and disciplinary procedures is just one of the law changes that will come into effect on 6th April.

We're delighted to report that the Irish Blood Transfusion Service is giving its full support to Dublin's "One City, One Book" - an annual initiative "designed to encourage everyone in the city to read the same book during the month of April each year".

North Korea, as expected, launched a large multi-stage rocket at the weekend. Parts of the stack fell on either side of Japan. Pyongyang claims that a satellite was put into orbit: Japanese and US air-defence commanders have stated this is untrue.

A Church of Sweden pastor faces possible expulsion from the ministry after drunkenly hitting a Christian online dating website and wooing women with chat-up lines such as "You look like a bearded lady".

Two Google engineers have answered Stevie Wonder’s recent plea for touchscreen phones to become more accessible to the blind and developed a sight-free phone dialling application for the Android platform.

The pocket-sized Flip camcorder was one of the top tech toys of summer 2008, and it spawned a host of equally diminutive copycat products – not to mention our own compact camcorder round-up. The secret of the Flip’s success lay in its sheer simplicity. Unlike most digital cameras and camcorders, which are festooned with buttons and menus settings, the Flip just had one big button for recording video clips, and two additional buttons for playing and deleting files.

Electronic vandalism, government espionage, ITU hideouts, luminous hairstyles and the coolest body piercings; the Hollywood portrayal of the hacking scene is one we are all familiar with. However this common portrayal often skips the fact that hacking is an art – indeed it is the fine art of creative problem solving.

In a finding sure to send ripples of fear through the showbiz world, profs in Florida have disclosed that having sex with people who are much older or younger than you increases your chances of catching a Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD).

The Vatican has pulled off its customary Holy Week stunt of outdoing The Da Vinci Code by publishing an article which claims the Knights Templar were the custodians of the Shroud of Turin for 100 years, and were accused of heresy for their pains.

Holistic brand reconceptualisation has come to Symbian, or more accurately The Symbian Foundation, as the administrative rump of the British mobile software company is now known. Symbian still licenses Symbian OS, but since it has no engineers (1,000-odd development staff have joined new owner Nokia), Symbian was in need of a new look. Cue the joss sticks and the whalesong.

The de facto standard for netbook storage might now have become the hard disk, but that still leaves rather a lot of machines out there with solid-state drives, some fast, some slow, all low capacity, at least when compared to HDDs.

BT is still working to restore access to thousands of people and businesses in east London left offline when a tunnel borer cut through fibre cables and copper wire. The problem is also preventing Transport for London from managing its traffic lights.

US military brainiacs have notified the boffinry community that they need a new miracle material called "Power Skin", which would "harvest" energy from its surroundings and also be strong enough to make robots out of.

One quick way to make a few bucks this morning, if you happened to read the IT press over the weekend, is to short sell shares in Sun Microsystems, now that the rumoured acquisition of Sun by rival IBM seems to be unravelling.

We're obliged to all of you who follow El Reg's world-beating improbable Swedish news for pointing us in the direction of the shock case of the Japanese pop pineapple who was over the weekend beaten and relieved of 20,000 kronor (£1,680-ish or ¥252,167) worth of camera kit.

Overlooked design weaknesses in a widely used type of wireless network are seriously jeopardizing the network security of the retailers and manufacturers that rely on them, a security expert has determined.

The low-hanging fruit for server virtualization - customers who already knew they needed it on their x64 iron whether the economy was in good shape or bad - must be starting to dry up as the competition among virtualization-hypervisor providers heats up.

The US Justice Department under President Obama is invoking Bush Administration tactics to dismiss a lawsuit alleging federal agents engaged in illegal phone and email surveillance of ordinary US citizens.